How to do an SEO Content Analysis of your website

Written on 30 July, 2019 by Raul Chango
Categories News Search Engine Optimisation Small Business Web Design & Content

It’s super important for your business’s website to be engaging and high quality, with both effective content that appeals to users and optimised content with appropriate keywords that boost your site with the search engines. We know that this is ultimately how we improve online search visibility and customer engagement and conversion.

According to the 2018 Telstra Small Business Intelligence Report, 83% of customers say search is important when finding or considering a business, yet only 26% of small businesses currently use SEO and only 9% use Search Engine Marketing. This means that many businesses, (potentially yours,) are missing out on some fruitful opportunities to boost their businesses online.

However, it’s a tough task to try and analyse the quality and effectiveness of the content currently on your business’ website. With phrases ranking, design modernity, mobile performance, branding, tone of voice and diverse media to worry about, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by even the thought of carrying out an analysis. However, it’s extremely worthwhile to determine what is working on your website, what isn’t and what could improve your website – even if you only tweak a few things here and there.

In this guide, we’ll break down the essential knowledge and tools you need, step by step, to complete an SEO Content Analysis of your own website. Doing so will lead you to discovering some content gaps you’re missing, that if filled, could move you up in the search engine result pages and ultimately get you more customers! Plus, you can download our free SEO Content Analysis template to help you get started your own analysis.

Step 1. Choose which landing pages you should assess

Depending on the number of landing pages your website has, you’ll want to look at the key pages that are most relevant or the ones where most of your traffic is landing. The most important pages are generally your home page, your ‘about us’ page, your contact page, a few popular product pages and your blog page. At the beginning of this process, identity 8-10 landing pages you think are the most important to have a close look at, so that you can get cracking on analysing each one. You can determine some of your key pages by using Google Analytics to find the high-traffic areas.

 

Step 2. Determine the number of phrases ranking on each page

Keywords are the bedrock of SEO. In order to be indexed by search engines and found on the top results pages by the hundreds or thousands of people searching terms relating to your business, you need to get a good understanding of how many keywords and phrases you’re already ranking for. The higher you are on a search engines results, the better; so the more phrases your ranking for, the merrier! You can use Moz’s Keyword Explorer to determine how many phrases your ranking for on each one of your chosen landing pages.

Once you’ve completed this step, collate this information and take a look at the results. You might have 550 phrases ranking for your home page, but only 1 phrase ranking for your contact page. If one or more of you pages have a low number of phrases ranking, then you might want to invest in creating some optimised on-page copy with lots of relevant keywords and phrases. Luckily, WME can help you with this process. You can find out more with a free SEO quote.

Determining the number of phrases ranking is a great way of determining which of your pages need more optimised written content in order to improve engagement with site visitors and improve your page rankings.

 

Step 3. DIY test for the number of indexed pages

If your website doesn’t have any or many indexed pages, it means that search engines aren’t ‘crawling your pages’, which essentially means that you’re not being found and read by search engines. This is bad, because it means that they cannot ‘index’ you. It’s important for your pages to be indexed because if they’re not, then they don’t appear in relevant search engine results pages; and essentially, potential customers aren’t seeing you. Indexing is done on a page-by-page basis, which means that search engines treat them individually.

If some or all of your pages aren’t indexed, then there’s most likely a larger SEO problem at play, or, it could be because there isn’t enough optimised content on your pages. Either way, WME can help you address these issues. To determine how many indexed pages your website has, you can do a DIY test. We’ve included a short how-to for this test, explained in the instructional guide for the template below.

Step 4. DIY test all pages for mobile friendliness

Forty-eight per cent of customers shop at least once a week on a mobile device, (according to the 2018 Telstra Small Business Intelligence Report,) so it’s important that your website performs well and is easy to use on people’s mobile. To determine how mobile-friendly your website is, you can do a DIY test. We’ve included a short how-to for this test, explained in the instructional guide for the template below.

 

Step 5. Analyse content quality

There are some key criteria you should look for when it comes to evaluating the quality of your website’s content. Remember – your content needs to be engaging for users but also easy for the search engines to ‘crawl’ so they can index you. When analysing your website, you want to find certain things and are key indicators of good website content –

  • Modern site design – You don’t want your website looking like something out of the 90s. Having a modern site design shows customers that your business is up-to-date, reliable and authoritative in the marketplace.
  • Detailed information on every page – Not only does detailed information on every landing page help your pages rank better in the search engine results pages, but it is also usually appreciated by users who are looking for information and need help navigating your website.
  • Use of multimedia – A diverse use of multimedia, such as video, gifs, graphs, images, links, are important for user engagement. If your website contains nothing but written copy, visitors will soon become disengaged with your business, so it’s important that your website includes a rich and diverse range of multimedia.
  • Effective and frequent CTAs – CTAs, or ‘Call to Actions’ are banners, buttons, graphics or text on a website that prompt users to click it to continue on to new pages and ultimately, move further down the purchasing funnel. The effective positioning and frequency of CTAs on your website can greatly increase the odds of users converting.
  • Fitting branding and tone of voice – A website should have consistent branding and tone of voice throughout each page. A strong and consistent tone of voice, (which is basically a way for your business to express its identity through content,) is essential to help customers trust your business and engage with your content. You can find out more about business tone of voice here.
  • Social Media links and clear contact details – Having accessible links from your website to your social media accounts will help users engage more with your brand and business, while having clear contact details on an accessible contact page will help them know how to ask questions and book/buy your business.
  • Blog – if your website has a blog (we highly recommend having one as it’s a great opportunity to increase your ranking positions,) it is important that the blog has fresh content. Fresh content will generally boost your ranking opportunities and increase user trust in your business and authority in your brand. Readability is also essential, as users will stay engaged with content that they can easily process and understand. It is also important to include internal links to other pages on your website as this improves user navigation and user experience, while it can also help people move further down the purchasing funnel.

Not sure how to assess the content quality on your website? Don’t worry, we’ll help you and show you how to assess your website using all of this criteria in our downloadable SEO Content Analysis template.

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